The Faculties

A History

Edited by Dominik Perler

Description

It seems quite natural to explain the activities of human and non-human animals by referring to their special faculties. Thus, we say that dogs can smell things in their environment because they have perceptual faculties, or that human beings can think because they have rational faculties. But what are faculties? In what sense are they responsible for a wide range of activities? How can they be individuated? How are they interrelated? And why are different types of faculties assigned to different types of living beings? The six chapters in this book discuss these questions, covering a wide period from Plato up to contemporary debates about faculties as modules of the mind. They show that faculties were referred to in different theoretical contexts, but analyzed in radically different ways. Some philosophers, especially Aristotelians, made them the cornerstone of their biological and psychological theories, taking them to be basic powers of living beings. Others took them to be inner causes that literally produce activities, while still others provided a purely functional explanation. The chapters focus on various models, taking into account Greek, Arabic, Latin, French, German and Anglo-American debates. They analyze the role assigned to faculties in metaphysics, philosophy of mind and epistemology, but also the attack that was often launched against the assumption that faculties are hidden yet real features of living beings. The short "Reflections" inserted between the chapters make clear that faculties were also widely discussed in literature, science and medicine.

The Faculties

A History

Edited by Dominik Perler

Author Information

Dominik Perler is Professor of Philosophy at Humboldt-Universität, Berlin. He previously taught at Oxford and Basel and has had visiting appointments at UCLA, Tel Aviv, Wisconsin-Madison and Princeton. He is Member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Arts and Science. His research focuses on medieval and early modern philosophy

Contributors:

Klaus Corcilius is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Streben und Bewegen: Aristoteles' Theorie der animalischen Ortsbewegung (2008) and of several articles on Aristotle's theory of desire, animal motion, and human action. Recent publications include a volume co-edited with Dominik Perler, Partitioning of the Soul. Debates from Plato to Leibniz (2014).

Helene P. Foley is Professor of Classics, Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of books and articles on Greek epic and drama, on women and gender in Antiquity, and on modern performance and adaptation of Greek drama. Author of Ritual Irony: Poetry and Sacrifice in Euripides (1985), The Homeric Hymn to Demeter (1994), Female Acts in Greek Tragedy (2001), Reimagining Greek Tragedy on the American Stage (2012), and Euripides: Hecuba (2015); co-author of Women in the Classical World: Image and Text (1994). She edited Reflections of Women in Antiquity (1981) and co-edited Visualizing the Tragic: Drama, Myth and Ritual in Greek Art and Literature (2007) and Antigone on the Contemporary World Stage (2011).

Johannes Haag is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Potsdam. He has published on early modern philosophy as well as contemporary theories of perception and the foundations of intentionality. He is the author of Der Blick nach innen. Wahrnehmung und Introspektion (2001) and Erfahrung und Gegenstand. Das Verhältnis von Sinnlichkeit und Verstand (2007), co-editor of Ideen. Repräsentationalismus in der Frühen Neuzeit (2010) and Übergänge - diskursiv oder intuitiv? (2013).

Rebekka Hufendiek is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Basel. Her main research interests are in the area of the philosophy of mind, especially embodied cognition, naturalism, and emotion theories. In her dissertation, she investigated embodied emotions. She co-edited a volume on embodied cognition, Philosophie der Verkörperung. Grundlagentexte zu einer aktuellen Debatte (with Joerg Fingerhut and Markus Wild, 2013).

Taneli Kukkonen has held appointments at the Universities of Victoria, Jyväskylä, and Otago and New York University Abu Dhabi. He specializes in classical Arabic philosophy and the Aristotelian tradition, especially in the fields of cosmology and philosophy of mind. He is the author of Ibn Tufayl (2014) as well as over thirty essays on topics in the Aristotelian and Platonic philosophical traditions.

Verena Olejniczak Lobsien is Professor of English Literature at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her major research interests are Early Modern English literature and culture with a focus on transformations of antiquity and their aesthetic potential. She is the author of Subjektivität als Dialog (1994), Skeptische Phantasie (1999), Transparency and Dissimulation: Configurations of Neoplatonism in Early Modern English Literature (2010), Jenseitsästhetik: Literarische Räume letzter Dinge (2012), and, with Eckhard Lobsien, co-author of Die unsichtbare Imagination (2003).

Saskia K. Nagel is Assistant Professor at the University of Twente, Netherlands. Her background is in cognitive science and in philosophy. She is interested in the anthropological, ethical, and social dimensions of scientific and technological progress and in the role of technologies for human self-understanding. Her recent work focuses on questions about self-determination throughout the lifespan. She seeks to understand public attitudes towards scientific developments. She is author of Ethics and the Neurosciences (2010) and has published various articles on ethical questions related to neuroscientific progress, in particular on neuro-enhancement and questions of autonomy.

Stephan Schmid is Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where he works on early modern and medieval philosophy as well as on contemporary analytic philosophy, focusing mainly on metaphysics (modality, causality, ontology) and philosophy of mind (intentionality). He is the author of Finalursachen in der frühen Neuzeit (2011), co-editor of Final Causes and Teleologial Explanations (2011) and Dispositionen. Texte aus der zeitgenössischen Debatte (2014), and has published various papers on Aquinas, Suárez, and Spinoza.

Markus Wild is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Basel. His research focuses mainly on early modern philosophy, philosophy of mind, and naturalism. He has worked on Montaigne, Descartes, Hume, animal minds, mental representations, consciousness, and teleosemantics. He is the author of Die anthropologische Differenz (2006) and co-editor of Animal Mind & Animal Ethics (with Klaus Petrus, 2013).